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While I was working on a certain DNS traffic management tool (Akamai) I found a checkbox to enable Collapse CNAMEs. I did not find any useful resources on this topic. What does it mean and how it works? Any idea?

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    You should ask Akamai, unless someone has experience working with this particular Akamai option, this is open to speculation. Jun 6, 2021 at 22:08
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    I don't think it is particular to akamai's service as I did saw it in another DNS management tool. I think it will be useful to the community if someone who has experience makes it clear for everyone.
    – Aminovic
    Jun 6, 2021 at 22:58
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    "I don't think it is particular to akamai'". It is particular to that provider or some providers. It is certainly NOT in standard DNS. Maybe it means it replaces a list of CNAMEs linked together by a single one. Or something else. Maybe related to apex( where CNAME are not allowed, so providers proposed non standard solutions for that). Who knows? Ask the provider where you found that. Jun 7, 2021 at 1:58
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    Someone answered my question and make it clear. Thank you anyway
    – Aminovic
    Jun 7, 2021 at 17:07

1 Answer 1

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This really seems like Akamai's equivalent of Cloudflare's CNAME Flattening.

This is what Cloudflare says:

To accomplish this, we extended our authoritative DNS infrastructure to, in certain cases, act as a kind of DNS resolver. What happens is that, if there's a CNAME at the root, rather than returning that record directly we recurse through the CNAME chain ourselves until we find an A Record. At that point, we return the IP address associated with the A Record. This, effectively, "flattens" the CNAME chain.

An ancillary benefit we've found is that we decrease the time for CNAME resolution by about 30% on average.

And what Akamai shows in their document:

Click this to enable the collapsing feature and provide only the final CNAME answer rather than returning all CNAMEs.

Just as an example, say you have

mysite.example.com -> www.example.com

www.example.com -> 200.200.200.200

This feature effectively 'flattens' or 'collapses' the CNAME chain to only provide the final IP address as if mysite.example.com was pointing to the A record directly.

mysite.example.com -> 200.200.200.200

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